Visitor's Guide to Quatropolis

A Visitors Guide to Quatropolis

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Everything you always wanted to know about the famous four cities

This guide will cover just about everything any descent tourguide will be able to tell you about this sprawling urban jungle

The following Chapters are included for your convenience:

History

Main Features

Factions & Government

Noteworthy People

Demographics

The history of Quatropolis

The origin of the four cities

Quatropolis is actually a conglomeration of four separate cities that had once began as small towns, considerable distances apart. There was the harbor town of Zenun, which stems from pre-Turil times when the native Zenians used it as a raiding platform. The district of Zenun is commonly known as the Mercantile Ward, for it is where almost all of the city's trade takes place. Many of the older buildings were built during the times when fierce Zenian marauders sailed along the coastline in search for wealth to plunder. Often they were quite succesful at it, which can be seen just by looking at some of the great stone buildings they left, already incorporating a lot of the Dwarven architecture that we still use today.

South-east of that a governmental hub was built in the Turil period, dubbed Thurial by Turilian rulers, in order to better organize trade and diplomatic endeavors as well as the execution of the law in the surrounding lands, after the native Zenians had been subdued by the first Turilian dynasty. The King's goal at the time was to completely assimilate the barbaric Zenians, so they would never again pose a threat to their coastal fiefs or their overseas trade routes.

The third town was built around a temple complex during the day's of a pre-divine Zhul. The Mehrunite complex, called "Vyvar", was later transformed into a Zhulite thaumatological research facility in the days of Mehrun's decline. The Zhulites renamed the town "Mechanis" and welcomed other faiths to establish temples around theirs, for there should be not one true religion, according to the lore of Zhul. The Pantheon is after all a warm and wonderful  family to belong to as the Zhulites boasted, however disputable these claims may seem to some scholars.

At last during the last Turilian – Zenian war the fourth town was built at a cliff edged bay with steep paths leading to a great military harbor built under the command of a famous Turilian general who went by the name of Darius Incantus Beliocus. The general gave his name to the military town and dubbed it Belioca Bay. It lies several miles west of Zenun.

In modern times we can observe almost no separation of these four cities, in fact, the way the city is organized these days the division is purely one which historians or carthographers might debate about. The towns have grown as centuries past, even surviving such horrors as the great plague and the wars that preceded and followed that period. Though ever more, the towns grew towards each other, until their borders merged and their rulers formed the Quatropolian Council, which would later be one of the main fundaments on which the Zenian Federation was founded, with a Senate that consists of representatives of all the different cultures that have come to inhabit Zenia.

Some of the native Zenian lords still hold rightful claims upon the lands around Quatropolis and they hold much sway among its more traditional citizenry. Though none wish to go back to the days that the four cities were founded, people do have a memory for such awe inspriring names as: Harold the Unforgiving, Red Sea Ragmar and Torbec Castle Crumbler to name but a few. The ancestors of these historical figures are still in power today and the hereditary powers they hold remain as solid as a Caementi's bottom.

The fall of mankind

After the main Turil army had been defeated by an alliance of native Zenian Lords, aided by some Fey Nobles as well as an Orcish Warchief who led several green skin tribes into battle; the king of Turil at that time: Mardic IV, gave his general the order to pull back the fleet from Zenia and return home. This also had to do with the threat of a plague. He had been warned, a horrible illness, the likes of which had never been seen before, was spreading from Rontra lands into the Turil Empire. The plague would eventually kill off more than half the global population of humans as it swept across their lands. It also affected many of the other races, rarely proving lethal in those cases however. Only the Rontra and the Stoutfolk seemed to be immune to the disease, steadilly becoming the new civilized powers in the world.

A lot of humans have conspiracy theories about that period, even relatively tolerant people might claim the disease was grafted by foul magic and its effects had been tested on kidnapped humans in foul Rontra facilities. They even go as far as to say that Stoutfolk merchants, who played an insignificant role in the world at the time, funded this project in order to plan a great usurpation of the human empire's vast colonial lands. This usurpation did come after the plague, however proof of the facilities was said to have been destroyed when king Mardic V ordered his royal wizards to scour their Rontra colonies with magical flames from their airships. By following their king's orders they completely laid waste to Byzanos, Ragan and Nimesh, where the disease had first spread among human colonists. This forever damaged the relations between Turil and the Rontra Republic. The human king and his descendants vowed this was the only option to save the human race from extinction. The humans had deduced that new variants of the disease always seemed to originate from the hinterlands of their Rontra colonies. Though the actual facilities were never found and neither were the Stoutfolk financial transactions to the colonies ever traced, it seems at least possible that such an atrocity could have taken place by the hands of the ones who gained the most power through the downfall of the human race.

Though it is also possible, and perhaps more plausible to the Rontra people that by annihilating the hearth of the plague, the humans also destroyed the inhabitant swampland insects, who's bite the Rontra know from folklore has always caused problems for non-natives.

The Stoutfolk believe themselves to have been protected by Lyrian himself and claim the whole plague had been caused by fanatical a Gardener cult operating from somewhere in Ragan. They were said to have been trying to rid the world of humans, whom they called a widespread form of vermin, through massive voodoo rituals, performed in the Ragan swamplands. These voodoo practitioners cursed the human race, the story goes, so that the Gardener would remove them personally from existence. Those who perished by the plague, the official Stoutfolk statement goes, had their souls severed by the Gardener's sickle, and would never be able to return to the mortal realm. This was to be the Gardener's revenge on the humans for bringing forth his rival, the prophet Zhul. It is perhaps interesting to note that the airships used by Turil to scorch their colonies where made by Zhulites and first drawn up at the Mechanis research facility. So if this version of history is true, then the Zhulites had their own revenge in the end.

What present day knowledge tells us

Some scholars claim that none of these accounts is completely accurate. This is explained by the fact that the first account doesn't explain fully how the use of such large quantities of mana, which are obviously needed to graft such a powerful pestilence spell, could have gone undetected by the Turilian royal wizards, who had far reaching scrying powers to remain in control of their realm. They would have easily noticed the effects in the mana field of their colonies, should any major spell be grafted there.

The second account could explain how humans are the only target of this strain of insect-born disease. This is because a strain could have adapted inside the human colonists into a kind of human-recognizing disease that could be spread from human to human, but not from human to, say, Stoutfolk or Rontra. The humans used a few of the other races as immigrant workers on the fields in the swamplands who could have developed the disease through these stages as well. Spreading it among their respective people. Furthermore, when everything was burned this could have ended the plague from generating new strains, so that any humans resistant to the existing variants would survive. The only thing not explained by this theory, the scholars claim, is the fact that the Stoutfolk, being no more resilient than hill dwarfs under the best of circumstances, were completely spared from the effects of the plague.

This takes us to the third theory, and how the scholars have weighed and judged it. The Gardener's lore has never dictated the eradication of the human race ever in history, except in a book written by a Stoutfolk Gardener priestess that violently opposed humans in Proudfoot lands. She managed to gain a cult of Stoutfolk worshipers around her whom she incited to kill as many humans as possible in order to terrorize them out of their lands. The priestess, Byacci was her name, predicted in the book something she called “The Great Cleansing” after which would come “The Rise of the Stoutfolk.” The book was banned by the emperor for it contained passages that could severely damage public relations with the human survivors if not made illegal. So could a cult of these stoutfolk have traveled all the way to the swamplands of Ragan? Turilian historical accounts do tell of some stoutfolk traveling there, but nothing about their beliefs. The scholars ask themselves this question as well as how likely it is that the Gardener would agree to decimate the human race and at the same time have his sibling Lyrian protect the Stoutfolk from any harm.

Perhaps both children of Fahra created this nightmare scenario as a warning to the world that with great triumph eventually comes great loss, even for an entire race. The humans, who's empire was vast and ruled parts of all the different races in the known world and from the capital of whom had come the prophet that had ascended to godhood, had perhaps become an arrogant lot in their eyes. Furthermore, the humans didn't look like they would ever have their power pruned by any of the other races, so it might just be that the two Gods joined forces and added a plague to the world that would trim down the most prominent species in the world. So this story seems possible so far, but again, when the humans used their Zhul given powers to destroy the source of the plague this could not have changed the will of the Gods, even though no-one knows whether perhaps Zhul himself negotiated with the other Gods in order to put a stop to the plague before the world would lose its equilibrium. Though in these speculations one could easily replace Zhul with Mehrun, or even have them both argue on behalf of mankind. For both are Gods who were once human. Even though Mehrun had been reborn as all of the different races throughout his divine soul's existence and only became human so that he would have a neutral avatar towards all the other races, once he had attained Godhood. For humans are deemed the neutral race in the eyes of other races. They were the first to achieve civilization and tried to teach it to the other races; the Turil dynasty being the most powerful of all civilized nations and the last of the great human realms. All other races, the lore of Mehrun teaches, are variations upon the first race of humans that Fahra dreamed up at the dawn of time. So could the plague be all the Gods work then? No, the story gets more complicated than that even. For it is highly illogical for the two gods to kill off half an entire race, sicken a bunch from the other races and completely spare two other races from this fate. It just does not correspond with their regular way of behavior.

The most likely version of the story, scholars have reasoned, is not an official viewpoint of any nation. This version has only recently been thought up by a panel of religious heavy weights, from the orders of Thanatos, Zhul, Mehrun and even the Gardener. They have deduced through a large scale study using epidemiological analysis of the spread of the plague and actual archaeological research in the former colony of Ragan, as well as consulting their respective patron deities to uncover the truth about this huge mystery. Even though the latter method did not reveal as much as they had hoped for initially, the first two methods gave them enough information for them to start asking the right questions. As most gods answer through the means of divination, the questioner needs to know exactly what it is he wants to know about a certain subject. The following story is a summarized version of the book they published years ago simply called “the Origin of the Great Plague”, which was read mostly by other scholars, as well as a handful of wealthy humans with an interest in their species' history. An illustrated copy of the book would auction for about 75 pieces of gold these days.

So what these religious scholars found was that a group of Stoutfolk cultists did travel on a ship to the shores of Ragan where they, disguised as simple Mehrunite pilgrims, came to the land in search for their own path to divine transformation. The scholars had found evidence of Mehrunite temples having been built in the swamps, however damaged they might have been after the Turilian scourging. The cult of Byacci's followers had inscribed passages of their holy book in the walls of the temple, in underground dungeons where none but archaeologists would ever find them. The dungeons had served as a laboratory for their research into ways of killing large parts of the human population. They soon found that there were all sorts of stinging insects that bit them, and made them sick, sometimes killing one of them. Being Gardeners they searched for a way to single out those bugs that killed off the Stoutfolk first and destroy them. Through prayers they asked the Gardener again and again to save them from the diseases spread by the flying pests. In the end it must have been Lyrian who, perhaps foolishly, pitied the cultists and gave the Stoutfolk their resistance against the deadly illness. The second part of their plan was to gather all the insects they could find and contain them in their big dungeon facility. Here the insects were systematically put together with kidnapped human victims, so they could see which insects had the worst effect on humans. What they found was that if they bred a couple of these bugs in with each other, the disease would become a lot more potent. The humans who got the diseases perished by the hundreds, and soon the cultists would run out of subjects. This gave them the idea to breed in some slower working versions of the disease in order to allow time for them to gather more subjects for their experiments. They did this by adding a tiny parasite in the mosquito's stinger, which would nestle in a human's organs and slowly start to excrete the deadly plague spores into the rest of the body. All they needed to do now was add some liquid lyrium to their stinging little allies, which would make the infected people radiate this disease, over larger distances. This lyquid lyrium must have been added to the insects bloodstream by feeding it an elixir containing, besides lyrium, some sugar, as bait, strong alcohol, to dissolve the other components in and a bit of brackish swamp water, so the mosquitoes' bodies would not reject and excrete the fluid. This elixir resembles the notorious drug Skooma a lot, but that is another story.

The stuff had to be fed daily to the disease carrying mosquitoes to infuse their plague carrying parasites with magically irradiated goo for a long period of time. So what they had made was a slow working, very deadly and infectious (through thaumic radiation) disease, which was to be the seed for the plague. All this had been deduced by scholars who had found a preserved mosquito cadaver under a rock somewhere in the dungeon. The thing was handled with extreme care by Stoutfolk and Rontra handlers, who had joined the effort and where the only ones immune to the disease, Rontra obviously for being one of the native species in the swamps and therefor naturally resistant to all the illnesses those marches could spawn. The means of spreading the disease through such a large part of the world however remained a mystery, until the scholars found the Body of a Rontra, who had been scorched almost to a crisp, except for some deep layers of fur, which had melted and solidified again to form a cocoon around a batch of tiny little eggs. The eggs contained unborn hatchlings of the mosquito that spread the super disease, and they too had inherited the thaumic radiation from their parents. The scholars found small traces of liquid lyrium in their blood plasma, which gave it away. The disease had a way of getting around now, if the mosquitoes could lay their eggs under the fur of the Rontra, who could not contract the disease themselves, then the Rontra could cross the sea into Turil, which the mosquitoes could never do by themselves, being such a long voyage across the sea. So when the unsuspecting Rontra migrated into Turil and Zenia, encouraged by the cultists who often paid for their passage under the guise of being charitable to the less fortunate in order to advance on the path to divinity; they unwittingly let the creatures loose upon the humans. The first signs of the disease would come after a few months, before which the parasite could already have irradiated many people with it's malevolent effects. This malefic radiation is what caused the royal wizards to believe the plague to have been caused by magic. They just could not detect the source of the liquid lyrium that made the disease spread so quickly and only people that somehow dampened the mana around them would be safe, unless they were stung by one of the mosquitoes.

The Royal wizards had found out after half the population had been infected how the disease spread and where it had come from. So they set out to ignite a cleansing conflagration that swiftly spread across their colonies, and burned every living thing there to ashes. Using powerful anti-thaumic bombs fashioned under a veil of utmost secrecy by a handful of Zhulite artificers as a means of spreading extremely hot flames across the land as well as sucking all the mana out of the area, which degrades all lyrium to a lower level and can lower the regional mana level to low or even zero mana in heavilly hit places. The dropping of these bombs killed off all the cultist who where not hiding deep below the surface, as well as the diseased colonists, the native Rontra, and all the flora and fauna of the land. Also, in the deepest dungeons where the elixirs were produced for irradiating the mosquitoes, the thaumic levels decreased so much that the elixirs lost all of their potency and the supplies of liquid lyrium degraded into solid lyrium crystals, which was useless to the remaining cultists.

So not having succeeded in her task of eradicating humankind, Byacci took her followers above ground again after the surface fires had extinguished. She apparently travelled east across charred lands, finally arriving at Iaman, a country that had always resisted any Turil immigration and remained largely uncivilized due to the large numbers of dangerous creatures that live there. Here Byacci gave her remaining followers orders to settle among the rock formations of the hinterlands of Iaman, called the teeth of atonement by some these days, for it is here that finally the Garderer came upon Byacci, as she had claimed had happened before she wrote her holy book, and told her about the ways of the universe and what role each part of that universe plays in it. This information gave her the power of omniscience, but made her quite mad at the same time. So her followers built her a temple at the top of a coastal cliff. Here one could still find her up until a few decades ago; acting as an oracle to the Stoutfolk and Rontra pilgrims that come there. Humans rarely visit the place and probably none of her visitors knew what she had done. This changed when a Thanatosian scholar came there to investigate the history of the plague. He asked her one simple question, for every pilgrim gets one; he asked her who had been responsible for the fall of humankind. He expected to get just another cryptic and enigmatic divination answer from the oracle, because the majority of divinations is ambiguous in its formulation, however; the oracle's answer could not be interpreted any other way this time. She screamed, as the answer dawned on her, and started running out off the temple, suddenly feeling the burden of her past deeds weighing down on her wretched soul. Her voice shouted that it had been her, Byacci, who was responsible for the fall of man, as she cast herself off the face of the cliff, onto the sharp rocks that pierced the sea's surface below. This caused much alarm around her fanatical followers, but being a Thanatosian trained in the ways of life and death the scholar promised he would give her back her life if the cultists told him everything they knew about the history of the plague and the cult who had created it, as well as how they had pulled off such a great scheme with such a small amount of Stoutfolk. They told him their stories and he in turn brought Byacci back, she had lost her omniscience somewhere in Limbo however and wasn't able to speak a word after what she had witnessed in the realm beyond the mortal one. Apparently a lot of the souls in Limbo have a grudge against her and want a piece of her as vengeance for her horrific acts against humanity. She can still be found there today sitting just outside of her temple, rocking back and forth, with a gaze that has dread written all over it. Her atonement lies in the fact of knowing that millions of souls await her in the afterlife and every day she comes closer to her death is a day closer to her utter doom. For reasons of pity and compassion the scholar visits the woman each year to cast a halt aging spell upon her frail little body, postponing her unavoidable fate.

So this was how the true story was found out, the rest we know from written Turilian history, which states that Byacci had been a religious leader of the Stoutfolk before the era of the Proudfoot Empire. It goes on to state that she went missing in Ragan some time before the great plague, leading a group of pilgrims into the swamps. It says nothing however about the actual beliefs they held, which were far from any of the dogma's dictated by the gods of the pantheon.

The name of the scholar of Thanatos has been omitted, for his life would not be safe would any vengeful humans learn of it, for in their eyes he is helping a mass murderer stay alive and keeping her from the justice she'll receive in the afterlife. Iaman is such an inhospitable place, none of these people would dare go there themselves to harm the woman, only the native Rontra and the cult's descendants; being the of the sixth and seventh generation after their misconducting ancestors, come there to pay their respects; not to Byacci herself though, but using her as a symbol of the plague's numerous victims, whom she is destined to face one day.

What this has to do with Zenia and Quatropolis

So as the humans from Turil left Zenia for their homeland, Quatropolis, as the region was called, got a little more empty than it used to be. Other races started to fill the gaps, like Rontra from the east, Dwarves and Sons of Solar from the north, and even some Nephilim from the far north-east. The native Zenian Lords and their people welcomed all these strangers to their lands, but unwittingly brought the plague into their homes as well, which the Rontra carried. A lot of the native Zenians died and of those that didn't a few fled towards the far north over the seas to live in Nortak, far away from any Rontra that could carry the plague. An infected ship would not make the journey across the ocean, for the sailors would be too sick to continue halfway. These Zenians became the barbaric raiders of the north. Others became very avid Rontra haters, trying to kill and burn as many as they could, while still others fled into the ancient Fey kingdom, where the plague never did spread for some mysterious reason.

After the great conflagration of the Rontra lands, the magical energy in the infected mosquitoes slowly started to diminish; not being resupplied by the daily elixirs in the cult's labs the liquid lyrium would degrade into crystal lyrium. So now only the people who actually get stung become infected, but this can usually be treated by healing mages who specialize in curing disease, cleansing and greater healing spells. Should the disease not be detected in time once contracted one can also contaminate others through excreted bodily fluids, which tend to gush from the lumpy boils during the final stages of the disease. In this stage the parasitic spores have spread throughout the body and heavy damage has been done to the body's vital organs.

These day there are still minor outbreaks of the disease in Quatropolis, now and again. These are usually taken care of by the authorities swiftly and efficiently, quarantining the patients and systematically curing their diseases as well as removing the parasites and healing the internal damage, with the help of devout priests and skilled mages. Loss of life through plague infection is kept to a minimum this way. Only those who lock themselves away or go underground during a breakout have the risk of not being noticed by authorities and that way will also avoid receiving proper treatment, before the disease manages to reach the critical stage where simple healing magic no longer helps. The authorities uphold a lot of hazard reducing regulations, in order to make the city a safer place for its people. The strangest of these include mandatory scrub-washing of new immigrants, especially those with fur, to kill the eggs of any diseased bugs. There are also the many compulsory mosquito hunts held by the Quatropolis health comity at least twice a week in the hot season. Members of the comity go out to recruit people who then have to refuel the Zhulite contraptions that fire minor electrical bolts at nearby mosquitoes; these have been hung near the doors and windows off many public buildings. They also go into places where the mosquito's are prone to breed, in order to spray them with an alchemical powder that makes them sterile. Lastly they fix the insect screens people have in their windows for free, so that everyone can sleep safely at night. Should a person start to feel sick however, or notice he's been bitten by one of these bugs, which are considerably larger than any native mosquitoes, or notice these things in someone else; one should immediately go to the nearest disease control office, where there always is a specialized healer on staff who can put you back on your feet within a day.

The coming of the Stoutfolk and the vassal races

The Stoutfolk really filled in the gap the humans left perfectly, but instead of only defending against the attacks from uncivilized races of Caninites, Taurians and the brutal Sons of Solar, they sought to either assimilate or subjugate these people. Assimilation went by bribing the least savage of the Caninite and Taurian tribes. First into working, but eventually into fighting for them. They were taken to the coastal cities that had been abandoned by the humans and put to work on reconstructing the cities into ideal Stoutfolk habitats. The armies of the young Proudfoot Empire used the Zhulite war apparati left behind by retreating Turil forces to conquer the tribes that could not be hired by them. Using assimilated Caninite warriors against savage Taurians and the assimilated Taurians in turn against the savage Caninite tribes successfully. When captured these savages were equipped with Zhulite headgear that administers painful electrical shocks when a Proudfoot enslaver turns the dial on his controlling device. This was to be their preferred method of conditioning them into following the orders of their Proudfoot masters.

After subjugating or assimilating most of it's direct neighbors into vassal states the Proudfoot Empire set sail for Zenia. The armada consisted of about five legions at the time, all well armed, with plenty of supply ships and even some aerial support. The airships were relics from the ancient cities of Al-Martec, here some Stoutfolk Zhulites unearthed the vessels which floated without the aid of lyrium, but in a way that still baffles Zhulites scholars today. Being unable to imitate the newly found airships didn't mean they couldn't learn to operate them however. The drawback of using these ships in a war is that they are irreplaceable when lost to enemy fire. Therefore they remain to be used solely as supply ships and long range artillery platforms to support their naval fleet. They look quite alien and might have been left by the Gythianki when they finally left to live in the astral plane for good, where these forerunners, as they are often called, had no use for these vessels anylonger. The ships are said to be equipped to fly in both this world and the astral plane and are able to form rifts in space somehow, though none of the Proudfeet have unlocked the mystery on how this is actually done.

With this huge war machine called the Armada, the Stoutfolk arrived in a country that had just driven of the remnants of the Turil dynasty, with it's makeshift alliance still partially in tact. Most of the greenskin tribes had left the alliance to head back east and a large part of the native Zenians were still recovering from the effects of the plague on the population.

The Fey Kingdom had made a pact with the new Zenian Federation, which consisted in that period of:

six human lords and their fiefs, with their respective armies;

two Deep Dwarf chief mining engineers and their entire mining operations under Quatropolis' soil;

three Hill Dwarf grand architects and their great fortresses fitted with large contingents of Dwarven guards;

seven Rontra statesmen, who had accompanied the Rontra immigrants to Zenia, to govern them and to organize the people into militias should the need to defend themselves arise;

three Nepharim shoguns, who have built small, but well defensible forts around Zenia staffed with samurai and homeland soldiers, to defend the Nepharim immigrants;

two Sons of Solar chieftains, one of whom defends the northern jungle's trade interests in Quatropolis, which is conducted by huge airships that seem to be powered by the divine energy of the sun itself, the other chieftain builds temples for Solar, in order to maintain a firm religious grip on the Solarian immigrants;

one orcish warlord of the Warsong tribe still remains loyal to Zenia, mostly because he needs to protect his people that have for a great part migrated onto the Zenian plains, where they hunt using traditional methods. These orcs don't have any airships as they do not adhere to Lord Omonos the God that allows the skies to keep afloat the fast raiding ships of their brethren to the east.

The Fey Kingdom itself, under the rule of the green dragon king Mordeus and his blue scaled queen Rihlan, have assigned eight Arborian supreme wardens, a dozen Elfish ranger generals in addition to a battalion of gnomish forest mages. Their main concern was in keeping Zenia as a friendly buffer zone against threats from the outside world.

The Halfling armada, as it was called by Zenians, was spotted by Zenian airships, who seemed to have a larger number of airships than the Empire. Though the Zenians also outnumbered the stoutfolk armada with perhaps 5:3 in manpower, the stoutfolk did have superior equipment. As well as a totally conditioned force or Taurians and Caninites ready to act as fodder for the slaughter. The Emperor had ordered his best tacticians to draw out a magnificent battle plan that would ensure their victory. The plans included a detour towards the east of Zenia, where contact was to be made with the greenskins, who would gawk at the might of the armada, the Proudfoot commanders expected, and would quickly rally themselves behind such a powerful force, giving the armada and the Zenians an equal number of airships again. And the Zenians homeland forces would now only outnumber the armada with 5:4.

The last trick was to send a few of the orcish and forerunner airships around the ancient forest to attack their main trade hub, Ursala, the orcs using hit and run tactics, while the forerunner ships barraged the city's defenses with its strange forerunner armaments. This forced part of the elven force to head back to defend their city. When they did this the manpower ratio became 1:1 which was in the advantage of the better equipped Proodfoot army. During the course of the battle the diversion units rejoined the main army, pursued by a furious Rihlan and her battalions of gryphon and hippogryph riders, which gave the Zenians air superiority again. The Emperor wanted to wrap everything up in one huge battle engaging all fronts at the same time, in a kind of shock and awe strategy his generals had proposed. This war was not about conquering Zenia, but showing them who's boss and establishing how the relations would be in the future.

The Zenians fought bravely and drove the Proudfoot legions east towards the city of Ritna, a city centered by five ancient mounds, once created by an insect like people that had disappeared from the world long ago. The locals were the people that were not accepted anywhere else in the world, and had therefore come to Ritna, where there was room in the shadow of the mounds for everyone willing to contribute a little to the community. As the first land armies arrived and the airships moored on Ritna's great mounds and the naval fleet at Ritna's harbor, the Ritneans where completely taken off guard. Ritna was immediately declared a new colony by the Proodfoot Emperor and it's riches would be considered the spoils of war. The city was plundered in a civilized manner, for there was little to be taken, not being a wealthy trade hub like Quatropolis. After this the armada quickly sailed back home claiming themselves to be at least partially victorious to the stoutfolk that had stayed home. Their greenskin allies were left in charge of Ritna, and the colony was to be used as a place of exile for offenders that did not by law necessarily need to be executed. This way criminals could not come back into stoutfolk society as they would become a pest to a whole other continent. The Zenians never tried to pursue the Armada, nor attack their greenskin allies. Instead they offered a truce to the orcs, which they wholeheartedly accepted, now being outnumbered 5:1 again. The orcs didn't like their role as guards of this penitentiary colony, so they slacked at their job, until they where driven off in an uprising by the exiled stoutfolk and the native residents. They returned back to their homes in the mountains, putting their alliance with the Proudfoot Empire on ice.

After the war, a lot of negotiations started, for both Zenians and imperials thought that a lot of money could be made through trade between the two nations. The Emperor sent his trade ambassadors and so did the Zenian Lords. Many profitable trade routes originated from the treaties that followed, most of which still exist today. The Armada never landed in Zenian lands again. But the trade vessels brought many stoutfolk and some Caninites and Taurians to Zenia, who all added more color to Zenian culture and even changed the common language by adding some of their own lingo. Many of them decided to settle in the hospitable country because they had had their first taste of freedom there. Every newcomer was given free health care, for the Rulers of Zenia could not afford to have another plague on their hands, like the one that ended the lives of so many humans. Though the rapidly breeding swamp mosquitoes could never be eradicated completely, the loss of live would be kept to a minimum from then on, through the efforts of the influential federal health comity. Immigration stabilized the next century and the population had become larger than it had ever been in the days of the Turil dynasty.

Recent times in the empire

During the latest Proudfoot conquest, that of the jungles of the Sons of Solar, the proudfeet employ a similar strategy as they did against the Taurians and Caninites. This is made more difficult however, because of the fact that Caninites and Taurians are not used to fighting in the jungle. Despite this apparent disadvantage the Proudfeet are making steady progress; though some say it will take another forty or fifty years before the vast jungles, and it's riches, are under the complete control of the empire. The war is waged using bribes for the willing and callousness against the unwilling.

Recent times in Zenia

Zenia's capital city Quatropolis has grown into a vast urban sprawl, housing little over one million residents. It needs a constant and precisely attuned supply management in order to keep the population from growing hungry and consequently becoming discontent. Much of it's food is generated on the well irrigated plains around the city, which hold vast farmlands that yield barely enough crops to feed everyone in the country. Zenia is home to a total of just under twenty million people these days and seems to be expanding mostly through it's high birthrate and low death toll, thanks to the Federal Health Comity. A lot of goods are imported from other nations like Turil, which seem to be doing a lot better these days, as well as from the Proudfoot Empire, the Rontra Republic and the mountain kingdoms of Ol'Darza.

The Fey kingdom has retreated more into the wilderness however, but pockets of adventurous Fey people can be found all over Zenia, trying to adapt to Zenian culture and habits.

Recently the Sons of Solar Chieftains have started to import more tobacco from their homeland, because this has become a valuable commodity. Smoking tobacco is encouraged by the Federal Health Commity, who have coined the sentence: “a tobacco smoking man is content with pipe in hand” meaning that people who smoke cause less trouble for the government. It also means that people have enough food, for they have money left for luxury leisure passtimes like smoking. Furthermore it is considered more healthy than drinking alcohol, or worse, using skooma, which is well known for causing all kinds of trouble.

The lasting bonds after the Proodfoot – Zenian war

The list of rulers that led the Zenian armies in one of the previous sections remains roughly the same, except that most Fey have headed deeper into the woods, away from the urban expansion of Zenia. Because of them taking a step back, the newcomers had an opportunity to gain influence.

There are three Taurian elder representatives in the federation, from the three different tribes who's people have moved to different parts of the land, some to labour in the spraws of Quatropolis, others staring farms, while still others have joined the Zenian homeland defense legions.

Five Caninite chieftains have done the same with their people, only they tend to join up with the more lucrative mercenary groups. They tend to fight more battles over the course of a year than regular armies, mainly against greenskin raiders or fighting in the war of the Empire versus the Sons of Solar, in which case either side will be offered a contract to hire them. This practice has caused a new proverb to come into being: "You can trust the dogs of war to bark on both sides of the sea." Implying that now that they are free to fight for whomever they want, they still end up fighting each other, only for different employers.

There are still the six descendants of the human Lords from the war, though a handful of Nortak raiders, that fled the horrors of the plague so long ago, claim their chieftain is in Quatropolis now and has a Zenian double-handed blade with him that proves his heritage. They are searching the city far and wide for their fearless leader, who ingloriously got defeated by an effort of the Turil navy to decrease the amount of raids on their coastal fiefs. When they find him they intend to reclaim the land they had abandoned so many years ago. The other lords have mixed feeling about this. On the one hand they welcome back their lost brethren, but on the other hand, it would be a governmental disaster to allow these uncivilized men to rule such well organized fiefs. They wouldn't understand modern politics and neither would they try to adapt to modern Zenian culture, seeing as how they claim leadership by waving a big metal heirloom in their faces. Either way, this chieftain has to be found and dealt with carefully, before he causes any trouble for the city. Perhaps they could rule a fief in the south-west of Zenia, far away from any major ports. Somewhere where they could do the least possible damage.

The dwarfs, Rontra, Nephilim and Sons of Solar in Zenia have retained the same amount of representatives as they had in the war, for it still seems to correspond with their respective races' populations. The greenskins have lost their seat in the federation senate however, because greenskins tend to be unregistered due to the fact that they live as nomads, spread across the southern Zenian plains.

The Stoutfolk at last are only allowed to have an advisory function in the senate, concerning trade, religious matters, matters of law and order, health and magical matters, however they get no say in anything concerning the army or diplomatic relations with other nations. This was all agreed upon in the treaties signed after the war. There are already six chairs filled with prominent stoutfolk immigrants, but none of the stoutfolk nobility, for that too is considered imperial entanglement in Zenian affairs. Only genuinely naturalized stoutfolk may play a part in Zenian politics. You can find more about this subject in the chapter about government.